Shockley’s beliefs don’t warrant honor

We believe that Auburn should not name the new park after William Shockley, who was a racist. Definition of racism: A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial difference produces an inherent superiority of a particular race.
Following are actual statements that William Shockley made in his crusade to get legislation to sterilize people with “intellectual and social deficits.” Shockley said the evidence was strong that there was a racial difference in intelligence, genetic in origin. He referred to “Our national Negro illness.”
“The major deficit in Negro intellectual performance must be primarily of hereditary origin and thus relatively irremediable by practical improvements in environment,” Shockley said. Simply put, education, environment and other measures cannot remediate the inferiority of African-Americans in Shockley’s mind.
In 1982 Shockley ran in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. His one and only issue: dysgenics. Dysgenics is the name for backward evolution caused by excessive reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged.
When Stanford University announced Shockley’s death in 1989, it noted that Shockley regarded his work on race more important than his discovery of the transistor, for which he won the Nobel Prize for physics.
Dan and Karen Tajbl, Auburn